NFC

Smartwatches are the talk of the town these days, with anyone and everyone rumored to be creating their own take on the evolution of the venerated timepiece. It will probably only be a matter of time before someone makes a smartwatch that outperforms a smartphone in some way, like, say, taking photos. And that's exactly the claim being made here with the Hyetis Crossbow smartwatch.

Lost keys, misplaced phones, stolen bags. These occurrences are so common that different solutions have been developed over the years ranging from muscle memory training to hi-tech gadgets. HTC might just have one such solution ready that makes use of something you always have with you: your smartphone.

Early this year we reported on HTC's launch of the HTC Mini, a small candy-bar phone whose sole purpose is to connect to the HTC Butterfly, known as the Droid DNA in the US. Since then, there has been little word about it due to it being available only for the Chinese HTC Butterfly model. But it seems that the strange Mini is about to make a reappearance, this time in the UK market.

Motorola is really pulling out all the stops in launching its latest darling, the Moto X. Motorola's new flagship is quite impressive, as we ourselves have experienced. But what brand new phone would be without some fancy accessories to go along with it? Introducing the DECK wireless speakers from Sol Republic, the first such accessory certified to be "M4DE for Motorola".

Near Field Communication or NFC-based mobile payments might start showing up over counters anywhere and everywhere as Isis starts rolling out its Mobile Wallet system nationwide later this year. Isis is a mobile commerce joint venture created by T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T to implement a system for tap-to-pay and redemption transactions at counters.

Sony has unveiled its latest Android timepiece, the Sony SmartWatch 2 SW2, a 1.6-inch touchscreen accessory to your smartphone or tablet. Pulling caller ID, messages, Facebook and Twitter notifications, music information and control, and more to your wrist, the SmartWatch 2 pairs via Bluetooth with NFC thrown in to make that straightforward.

Sony has officially taken the wraps off of its new phablet, the Sony Xperia Z Ultra, a whopping 6.4-inch Full HD Android smartphone powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 800 chipset. Running at 2.2GHz, the MSM8974 quadcore makes the Xperia Z Ultra one of the fastest - if not, for the moment at least, the fastest - phones around; it also gets 4G LTE and an 8-megapixel camera.

The GALAXY S 4 was discovered to be incompatible with the current line of NFC TecTile tags a few weeks earlier. At that time Samsung let it be known that a next-generation TecTile was coming and well, as of today they have come available for sale. The newly updated tags have been dubbed TecTiles 2 and they are currently available with Samsung.

It looks like Google Wallet will be amongst the topics discussed next week during Google I/O. Basically, Google is expected to announce some new features for Wallet. At present it looks like these will include everything from additional rewards and offers to loyalty points. Perhaps more important, it was also said that Google will be adding additional merchants which should make it a bit more convenient for those looking to actually use Wallet.

The Samsung TecTile tags are not a terribly expensive item, however it looks like those who are using the tags and also upgrading from a Galaxy S III to a GALAXY S 4 will need to buy some updated tags. Basically, the GALAXY S 4 is not compatible with the currently available NFC TecTile tags. This comes due to the bit about Samsung using a different NFC chipset in the GALAXY S 4.